5 Ways to Get the Most from Insight Boards

Insight Boards transform raw contract data into diligence intelligence by deploying AI agents to handle the heavy lifting of analysis and synthesis. To get the most value from the feature, it helps to understand how successful teams integrate it into their workflows. These five practices, drawn from firms seeing the strongest results, will help you maximize what Insight Boards can deliver: faster reviews, more consistent analysis, and reports that build themselves as diligence progresses.

1. Write Specific Instructions and Choose the Right Analysis Method

The quality of every insight starts with the clarity of your instruction. Directed questions produce actionable intelligence. Broad requests like “What are the target’s red flags?” generate surface-level findings that still require significant refinement. Specific questions like “Which customer contracts allow termination within 30 days of change of control?” produce analysis you can use immediately.

Beyond clarity, you also need to select the right analysis approach. When creating an insight card, you can indicate whether the underlying analysis should rely on Smart Table extraction or the agent’s search and read capabilities across your workspace.

Smart Table Analysis: Smart Tables work best for questions requiring specific provision extraction across many similar contracts. For example, “Which vendor agreements can be terminated for convenience by the counterparty?” The agent builds a table, identifies and adds the relevant vendor contracts, creates question columns for termination provisions, analyzes each agreement, and synthesizes the findings into a comprehensive insight.

Search and Read Analysis: Search and read capabilities work better for questions that require reviewing information across different document types or identifying patterns that are not tied to specific contract clauses. For example, “Who are the target’s top 10 customers in 2024?” The agent searches across financial statements, customer lists, invoices, and contracts to piece together the answer rather than extracting a uniform data point from similar documents.

2. Build Template Cards for Recurring Diligence Topics

The same diligence questions appear in nearly every M&A transaction: Do employment agreements include IP assignment provisions? What customer contracts require change of control consent? Has target uploaded all governance documents pertaining to the target and its subsidiaries? Rather than rebuilding the analysis approach each time, create template insight cards for these recurring topics.

Templates ensure consistency across deals and team members. When every transaction starts with the same framework, your results become more uniform and quality control becomes easier. Once you create a template card, deploying it on a new deal takes seconds. The agent follows the same instructions and produces analysis in the same format. Over time, your template library becomes a competitive advantage, allowing your team to move faster without sacrificing thoroughness.

3. Use Collaboration Features to Build Polished Work Product

Insight Boards are designed for team-based review, not solo work. Once an insight is generated, diligence teams can contribute their expertise in multiple ways. Team members can edit the analysis directly to sharpen language or add details, leave comments flagging areas that need context or raising questions about findings, flag insights for attention, or mark them as approved. Every action gets tracked in the activity history.

This eliminates the confusion that comes from versioned Word documents and scattered email threads. Everyone works from the same intelligence base, linked directly to source documents. By the time an insight is approved, it has been reviewed, refined, and validated by everyone who needs to weigh in, leading to a polished insight that can be incorporated into your work product.

4. Let Lexcel Lighthouse Keep Your Insights Current

Data rooms evolve constantly throughout diligence as new contracts arrive, missing documents get uploaded, and supplemental materials continue to appear. Manually tracking which insights might be affected by new documents creates unnecessary work and increases the risk that outdated analysis makes it into your final report.

Lexcel Lighthouse runs automatically in the background, monitoring data room uploads and alerting teams when new information could impact an existing insight. When you receive an alert, you can review it to determine whether the insight needs updating and regenerate it as needed. This keeps your intelligence current without forcing you to revisit every conclusion manually each time the data room changes.

5. Treat Insights as Your Final Report Components

Do not build insights in parallel to your traditional diligence workflow. Approved insights are sections of your final memo, not supplementary materials that need to be reconciled later.

Traditional diligence compresses synthesis at the end. Teams review contracts, build tables, and gather findings throughout the process, then rush to draft the memo during the final days before signing. Insight Boards eliminate that scramble by building the report progressively. As each insight gets reviewed and approved, it becomes a component of your final deliverable. By the time diligence ends, your memo is already in near-final form. You are refining language and formatting, not starting from scratch under deadline pressure.

Conclusion

Insight Boards work best when integrated into your diligence workflow from the start. Write specific instructions matched to the right analysis method, build templates for recurring topics, use collaboration features to refine insights as a team, respond to Lexcel Lighthouse alerts to stay current, and treat approved insights as components of your final report. These practices help teams move faster, maintain higher quality, and eliminate the end-of-deal scramble that typically defines M&A diligence.